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Food For Thought

Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Farmers

By Bren Smith New York
Times August 9, 2014

Bren Smith is a shellfish and seaweed farmer on Long Island Sound.

NEW HAVEN — AT a farm-to-table dinner recently, I sat huddled in a corner with some other farmers, out of earshot of the foodies happily eating kale and freshly shucked oysters. We were comparing business models and profit margins, and it quickly became clear that all of us were working in the red.
The dirty secret of the food movement is that the much-celebrated small-scale farmer isn’t making a living. After the tools are put away, we head out to second and third jobs to keep our farms afloat. Ninety-one percent of all farm households rely on multiple sources of income. Health care, paying for our kids’ college, preparing for retirement? Not happening. With the overwhelming majority of American farmers operating at a loss — the median farm income was negative $1,453 in 2012 — farmers can barely keep the chickens fed and the lights on.

Others of us rely almost entirely on Department of Agriculture or foundation grants, not retail sales, to generate farm income. And young farmers, unable to afford land, are increasingly forced into neo-feudal relationships, working the fields of wealthy landowners. Little wonder the median age for farmers and ranchers is now 56.

My experience proves the trend. To make ends meet as a farmer over the last decade, I’ve hustled wooden crafts to tourists on the streets of New York, driven lumber trucks, and worked part time for any nonprofit that could stomach the stink of mud on my boots. Laden with college debt and only intermittently able to afford health care, my partner and I have acquired a favorite pastime in our house: dreaming about having kids.

It’s cheaper than the real thing. But what about the thousands of high-priced community-supported agriculture programs and farmers’ markets that have sprouted up around the country? Nope. These new venues were promising when they proliferated over a decade ago, but now, with so many programs to choose from, there is increasing pressure for farmers to reduce prices in cities like my hometown, New Haven. And while weekend farmers’ markets remain precious community spaces, sales volumes are often too low to translate into living wages for your much-loved small-scale farmer.

Especially in urban areas, supporting your local farmer may actually mean buying produce from former hedge fund managers or tax lawyers who have quit the rat race to get some dirt under their fingernails. We call it hobby farming, where recreational “farms” are allowed to sell their products at the same farmers’ markets as commercial farms. It’s all about property taxes, not food production. As Forbes magazine suggested to its readers in its 2012 Investment Guide, now is the time to “farm like a billionaire,” because even a small amount of retail sales — as low as $500 a year in New Jersey — allows landowners to harvest more tax breaks than tomatoes.

On top of that, we’re now competing with nonprofit farms. Released from the yoke of profit, farms like Growing Power in Milwaukee and Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., are doing some of the most innovative work in the farming sector, but neither is subject to the iron heel of the free market. Growing Power alone received over $6.8 million in grants over the last five years, and its produce is now available in Walgreens stores. Stone Barns was started with a $30 million grant from David Rockefeller. How’s a young farmer to compete with that?

As one grower told me, “When these nonprofit farms want a new tractor, they ask the board of directors, but we have to go begging to the bank.”

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3 comments

Although he sounds pretty whiny (geez buddy, find a new line of work, this one is a dud and you should have known it going in), he raises good points, all of which are familiar to me as a farmer. If anything, I worry that farmers (larger scale farmers, that is, people who may have one other job but not two or three) are almost too powerful, politically. I won’t go into details, but farming is not all that much capitalism; it’s more like crony socialism, with the state doing the bidding of a powerful lobby. Now for a guy living in a pricey area, trying to live on shellfish and seaweed (I wish he’d told us more about his operation), I can see why he feels hung out to dry. In this country, we spend something like 7% of our income on food. (In farming, competition works out really well for the consumer.) Of course, the poor pay a much greater proportion of their income. But in much of the world, half of personal income goes to food. So, we have become super efficient food producers, with a razor thin margin of profit most years. Profitable farming in the USA is profitable because of our preference for meat. No beef, pork and chicken means little grain would be grown. So the prosperous farm sector would die off if few people ate meat, and the people raising organic produce and vegetarian foods people eat would still be in business, and would have to grow more. We would probably be back to labor intensive farming, in an age when few citizens are willing to do that kind of work for minimum wage. Or any wage, really. Anyone here willing to spend three or four times what they already pay for food? I’m glad you posted this, Kim, and I hope a number of FOBs read it. It is a national issue that hasn’t had its conversation yet. This gentleman either has to start his own organization, or rattle the cages of the Farm Bureau and other powerful existing NGOs which I hope he has done via his Op Ed piece.

I was thinking too that it seems that the farms that are the most successful, or that have longevity in our region, are the ones that create a private-public relationship, for example Russel Orchards, Wilson Farms in Lexington, Richardsons, and Green Meadow Farms. The first three especially are very creative in offering fun, family friendly activities and events that draw customers to their farms.

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